“She’ll feel awful bad if her flowers get frosted, especially them dahlias. Octavia sets such store by her dahlias.” In L.M. Montgomery’s 1914 short story “Bessie’s Doll,” a boy named Tommy Puffer overhears Mrs. Jenkins talking about dahlias, and because he can’t stand the idea that the flowers won’t get “a chance to blossom out royally,” he decides to save them from frost by tying newspapers around them, even though he hates Miss Octavia.

The dahlias at the Halifax Public Gardens were hit by frost a couple of days ago, but I spent a lot of time photographing them last week, thereby finding my own way to save them.

While I don’t know if there were dahlias in the Public Gardens during L.M. Montgomery’s time, I do know that Montgomery went for a walk with her friend Lottie Shatford in the Gardens 120 years ago today, on October 22, 1895. She had been living in Halifax for just over a month, studying English literature at Dalhousie, and she was “beginning to feel at home in the big rooms and long halls of the college,” as she wrote on October 3rd (The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery, Vol. 1: 1889-1910, ed. Mary Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston [Oxford, 1985]).

When Montgomery arrived on September 17th, she wrote “HALIFAX” and the date in her diary in capital letters, to emphasize just how important it was to her that she was about to begin her university education at last: “For the past four years the day when I should write that heading in my diary has danced before my eyes, an alluring will-o’-the-wisp of ambition and hope.” She was excited to be in Halifax, but wondered whether “after all it is really worth all the toil and self-sacrifice and struggle that I have expended in bringing it about.”

She found her English classes “very nice” (October 3) and she wrote an account of her earliest memory for Professor Archibald MacMechan—“Mine happens to be that of seeing my mother in her coffin and of putting my tiny baby hand on her cold face” (October 9). She and Lottie went to the Public Gardens on the 22nd “because we have to write a theme on them tomorrow.”

I’ve been to the Gardens several times recently, partly to admire the extraordinary beauty of the dahlias and partly because I’m taking a photography class this month, which means I, too, am working on specific assignments. This online class—which I’m enjoying immensely—is taught by Joy Sussman, whose work I discovered through her gorgeous photos of Edith Wharton’s house, The Mount.

Montgomery’s evening was “delightful,” “clear and crisp.” She wrote that “the gardens seem lonely and deserted now but are sadly beautiful even in their desolation,” with their grey paths, “whirls of crinkled leaves, “splendid amber-gold” horse chestnuts, and lakes and ponds “calmly silver in the dusky light.”

After her walk, she attended a “very pretty” performance of “Iolanthe,” remarking in her diary that her late night at the opera meant she was “getting shockingly dissipated.” However, she reminded herself, “one can go to bed every night and one cannot go to the opera every night.”

I wrote about L.M. Montgomery and Edith Wharton a few years ago—while their financial circumstances were quite different, both of them achieved literary success despite the fact that their families insisted education for young women was neither important nor desirable.

And both Montgomery and Wharton loved gardens. “Decidedly, I’m a better landscape gardener than novelist,” Wharton wrote in a 1911 letter to Morton Fullerton, “and [The Mount], every line of which is my own work, far surpasses the House of Mirth” (The Letters of Edith Wharton, ed. R.W.B. Lewis and Nancy Lewis [Scribner, 1989]). Just as Montgomery relied on gardens, parks, and forests for nourishment—finding, for example, that her walks in Halifax’s Point Pleasant Park provided a kind of cure for homesickness—Wharton turned to her gardens for comfort. As Hermione Lee writes in Edith Wharton (2007), there were times “when her garden’s rich dazzle of colour and scents was a sensual delight and a comfort to her.” On All Souls’ Day in 1923, Wharton wrote that she “sat alone in the evening with all my dead,” thinking about friends she had lost, and she recorded the names of the flowers blooming around her. Dahlias were first on her list.

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27 thoughts on “L.M. Montgomery and the Halifax Public Gardens”

Splendid post, what dahlias, longing to go to Halifax, and thank you so much for sharing Joy Sussman’s magical post! I still have to visit The Mount, though how could anyone ever visit under better circumstances than she did? I’ve been looking for a course like hers for a long time, except I think that what I need to learn most, alas, are the technical basics! Anyway, your post really spoke to me.

Hello Diana,
What a kind comment–I’m so glad you enjoyed my post (as well as Sarah’s, of course) about my visit to Edith Wharton’s home. It was indeed a magical day for me! Although my three online photo courses mainly concentrate on becoming more creative with your camera (or smart phone) and taking lovely shots without worrying about all of the technical jargon, I was hired by BlogHer to write a more technical article, which might help you. It’s linked here: http://www.blogher.com/cheat-sheets-3-simple-steps-finally-learn-manual-mode-your-dslr-camera

Diana, I’m so glad you enjoyed this post, and I’m excited about seeing you in Halifax for the JAS conference.

Joy’s class is wonderful, and I’m already thinking about signing up for her next one. Highly recommended!

Joy — someday perhaps I’ll learn manual mode. In the meantime, I’m very happy to be learning more about composition, lighting, and so on. And I’m very glad we met through our shared interest in Edith Wharton.

I know your images are copyrighted but they are now displayed on the screens in my O.R. The nurses love the photos (we can’t grow dahlias here in Texas) and they add some much needed color to our sterile environment. Too bad the patients are asleep!

Beautiful photos! I love dahlias and I think I love them even more now knowing about the connection to LM Montgomery. She really does sound just like Anne in her diaries doesn’t she? Also, the Halifax Public Gardens look like they haven’t changed in all this time which is just the most delightful thing.

Sarah, what a nice surprise today to read your fine post and see that you’ve mentioned not only my Edith Wharton blog post but my photography course as well–thank you kindly! I’m so glad I wrote that Edith Wharton post, which led to our friendship across the blogosphere. (And it’s been wonderful seeing your photographs blossom!)

What beautiful flowers! And photography! Those colors! Well done….For me, in blog world, or any world, it doesn’t get much better than books and garden strolls. (well if one happens upon a well-stocked tea table strewn with goodies and ‘hot cuppas’ that would be lovely, too) 🙂 I really enjoyed your selection of quotes from LMM and Wharton; very evocative.

The colours are pretty amazing, aren’t they? I went back to the Gardens a few days in a row because I couldn’t get enough. Thanks for the compliments. Good books and gardens are always an irresistible combination.

Welcome!

I write about Jane Austen, Jane Austen for kids, and Edith Wharton. Sometimes I post about other writers I admire, such as L.M. Montgomery, and about places I love (especially Nova Scotia and Alberta). I taught writing at Harvard University before I decided to come home to Nova Scotia to write full time.

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"I must keep to my own style & go on in my own Way; And though I may never succeed again in that, I am convinced that I should totally fail in any other." Jane Austen to James Stanier Clarke, 1 April 1816

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